My husband and I had the chance to visit Hawaii last year.
Though it was “vacation,” I woke up around 5:30 every morning because of the time zone change. One morning I tried some time lapse photography for the first time. I didn’t have much time to edit, but made a quick video.
I love seeing the colors, and I can just hear the ocean.
I’m currently writing this entry using a new monitor I’ve acquired this year. It’s not a super nice monitor, but it is a nice 24″ IPS monitor.
I mainly got it because I do a lot of photo editing and printing. And my laptop screen wasn’t working out as well as I’d like. I would edit photos and they’d look great on my screen, but then when I printed the photo or looked at the photo on a different display, it would look slightly different.
So, finally I got a better monitor. I plan on getting a calibrator eventually, but what I have has been a great improvement. And because it’s IPS, I don’t have to worry about having it at the wrong angle. (With your non-IPS laptop, you may notice that when you tilt the screen a little, it will look slightly different. What a pain if you edited all your photos with the screen tilted at the wrong angle.)
It’s kind of astonishing to me to think that I could have gone through my entire life using my own computer/monitor, not knowing that the image was off… with all my photos looking great on my monitor, when they perhaps are actually not as bright, or of the wrong tint. If I never calibrated my screen, or if I never saw my photos displayed on other people’s monitors, I would have never noticed that they were slightly off/different than I expected.
The ice is melting!
In case you are looking to hire a photographer… this might help you save some money.
When I was wedding planning, I did some research, learned the laws for Massachusetts, asked my photographer about it, and saved a nice chunk of change. Basically, depending on how your photographer charges/writes up your bill and/or whether the photos are delivered to you on a tangible medium, you may or may not have to pay sales tax on the entire package, which could be a lot given the cost of wedding photography these days!
From Massachusetts Directive 11-4:
Charges of a professional photographer are generally subject to Massachusetts sales tax where the final product is delivered to the purchaser in a tangible medium, regardless of whether those service charges are separately stated from the charge for the tangible item. Separately stated charges for services, such as “sitting fees”, provided to a customer who is obligated to pay for those services but not obligated to purchase any tangible personal property as part of the transaction will not be subject to Massachusetts sales tax.
The provided examples are quite helpful:
Example 2: A wedding photographer charges $3500 for services to photograph a client’s wedding day. The photographer also gives the client the option of acquiring the images taken at the wedding via digital download from the photographer’s File Transfer Protocol (“FTP”) site or a DVD of the images captured that day for a fee of $500. The customer opts to receive the images via digital download. Since there has been no transfer of tangible personal property, the entire transaction would not be subject to Massachusetts sales tax.
Example 3: A wedding photographer charges $4000 for a package that includes photography services for the wedding, and also a DVD of the images taken that day provided to client on a disc. The invoice to the customer does not separately state the charges for the wedding photography services and the DVD of wedding images. The total amount of $4000 is subject to Massachusetts sales tax.
Example 5: A portrait photographer charges a $200 sitting fee for a photography session of up to 1 hour, and $300 for the DVD of 40 images taken during that session. The customer is not obligated to purchase the DVD or any other tangible personal property, but elects to buy the DVD. The invoice to the customer separately states the charges for the sitting fee and the DVD. Sales tax is due on the $300 for the DVD, with the $200 paid for the sitting fee not subject to tax under the Miller Studios decision.